


Futile Devices

by nicasio_silang



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Satan loves Cool Runnings, me and Chloe just have a lot of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 18:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20068723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: She's got highlighters, post-it notes, index cards, a yellow legal pad with lines sketched on it to make a spreadsheet, and five hours while Trixie's with the sitter.





	Futile Devices

Chloe smoked, years ago, because that was what teenagers and twenty-somethings did while loitering outside of nondescript offices before and after auditions. It's what actors did between takes on their first and fifth and tenth job. Menthols and big, flashing teeth in a huddle among themselves, still sure that this would be the job where it clicked, then this one, then this one, everyone telling jokes about their own hopefulness, their own ambition, their own passion. Making fun of themselves for wanting something. She quit a few weeks before entering the police training academy. It made the cardio easier. 

The smell sends her back sometimes. Not just hot parking lots and dingy backlots, but earlier mornings too. Her mom's half-burnt toast and her sudden, vicious hugs. Her dad plucking the cigarette from between mom's lips, the glancing blow of a kiss on her frown, and he'd put it out in a potted plant by the window. He'd cut slices off a lemon and the two of them would squeeze them between their fingers over the sink, Chloe impatient by the door. 

And later mornings, Dan catching her with a cigarette on the front steps two weeks after Trixie was born. It was the first five minutes of privacy she'd had in longer than she could remember, and nothing felt as good as the spike of nicotine, the sun coming up over roofs of the apartment buildings across the street, their shadows falling shorter and shorter, one moment where nobody needed anything from her. Even the guilt of it was precious. The invisible tether from her body to her daughter's, stretched taut at all of fifteen feet and one doorway between them. Dan was wild-eyed when he found her, angry with himself for being angry with her. She'd stolen the stick from the months-old, crumpled pack in his glove compartment. It went out under his heel, but he gave her five more minutes on her own. 

When she comes back to the penthouse, Lucifer's silver cigarette case is on top of the piano. Five long Silk Cuts, one tapered joint. She slips it into her pocket. 

It would be pathetic, she thinks, and faintly ridiculous, to come back here and wander, empty and aimless. Chloe wishes, for a minute, that she could be the woman who did that. Like someone from a gothic story that happens in a place where it rains. Thunder out on the balcony and she'd haunt his rooms, the wind blowing her hair around her shoulders and some long black dress around her ankles, something very cinematic. She wishes she weren't so mundane. He'd never asked that of her, but it's hard not to want it, just a little. To be a woman out of a story. Things happen for women in stories. Thunder, lightning, miracles. She could crush chicken bones and frog's eyes with a mortar and pestle, turn in a circle seven times underneath his branching chandelier, and he'd appear in a puff of feathers and brimstone. But she's just Chloe. She's got highlighters, post-it notes, index cards, a yellow legal pad with lines sketched on it to make a spreadsheet, and five hours while Trixie's with the sitter. 

She starts making a catalog of his books and journals. Organize what's available first, read it later, cross-reference third. There are miscellanea that will need to be categorized and ordered—parchments, maps, scrolls, some modern and some crumbling under her fingers, sheafs of sheet music in a hundred different hands. And there will be more, all around, objects and knick-knacks. He's a magpie, made a nest of every shiny thing, and then there's still the safe and whatever he'd left there. But she starts with the bookshelves. 

At first, she thinks there's no system at all. Thin pages of correspondence with Mary Shelley are stuffed between two chapters of _Brideshead Revisited_. Four bound volumes of cultural reportage covering Shanghai from 1922-1932 are bookended by a DVD of _Cool Runnings_ and a signed copy of Neruda's _Los Versos del Capitán_. It takes her way too long and far too many unnecessary columns in her spreadsheet before she remembers the system he'd once imposed on her desk and realizes that the bookshelves are ordered by moods. Fancies filed away for a rainy day. She slaps a label of "bittersweet nostalgia??" on the listed contents of the first two shelves, then takes five to stretch her legs. 

When she gets back to it, she figures the next four shelves for "petty re: depictions of dad" because she can't quite get herself to write the word "God" in a spreadsheet. The spine of his collected edition of _His Dark Materials_ is cracked in two places, even though it was only a month ago that he'd sat on the floor by Trixie's bed, long legs stretched out, listening riveted as Chloe read the first chapter of _The Golden Compass_. Trixie wanted another, then another, even though it was nearly grown-up bedtime, and Lucifer wheedled right along, his promised nightcap and casework plans abandoned. Chloe marks the category with an asterisk for possible relevance. 

The next shelf is easy ("sharks"), and the section after that is a jumble of Kathy Reichs novels, criminology texts from various eras, signed headshots of Lucy Liu, and the script of the 1988 movie _Feds_. She generously calls this "work-related". 

There's half a shelf for getting morose about long-dead musicians, a few stray recipe books, and an impressive-but-unsurprising number of volumes on haberdashery, one line of them held up by a complicated three-tiered box in dark red wood, each drawer packed to the brim with buttons. She'd swear in court that she's only seen him wear three, maybe four colors of button, but when she pulls the first drawer open a little too hard, they spill out in a clown car rainbow and tinkle off across the floor. It's funny, it should be funny, but the sight and the noise of them rolling away and under the couch breaks loose a shard of panic inside her. For all his excesses, all the binges and the debauchery, Lucifer liked his things tidy. It's one of the first things she really understood about him—the way he could hold whatever was inside himself at bay with the precise, studied folds of a pocket square. The crease of his trousers, the flat fall of his vest, the careful sweep of his hair. Affected, but never insincere. Each piece in place, a bulwark. The buttons skitter everywhere at once and Chloe drops onto her hands and knees to chase them. 

When she thinks she's found them all it's almost 10 o'clock and she'll need to go soon, and everything has taken too long. This will take too long. She smooths a hand over the spreadsheet pages. She shuffles her index cards. 

Maze had said, "It's like, I don't know, it's like…" She'd done something with her hands in the air like she was kneading dough, or giving a shoulder rub to some massive beast. "It's just time, okay, time in Hell is like time. What, as if you know how to explain time on Earth?" 

"Well, yeah," Chloe had said. "One thing happens after another. Seconds, minutes. Etcetera." 

"Okay, fine. It's not like that. Or sometimes it is. Some stuff definitely happened before other stuff, and some stuff definitely hasn't happened yet, but everything else is pretty much forever. Or all at once. Seriously, it's not that complicated." 

Maze had been getting that look in her eyes, so Chloe dropped it and tried again to ask about the politics of it all. The structure, the big players, the loopholes. She didn't make much headway. Maze fled, said not to call her. And Chloe gets it, she does. She gets being torn in two. The look on Maze's face when Chloe told her why Lucifer had left; the look on Maze's face when she said Charlie's name. Amenadiel telling Chloe that he couldn't take a living soul to Hell; Trixie asking her what was wrong and also what was for breakfast. Trying, and failing, to live with two things. Lucifer's face and Lucifer's face. She gets that Maze doesn't know where she needs to be. He's been gone less than a week. Chloe doesn't know if that means it's only just happened, or if that means it's been forever. 

Chloe isn't afraid of the balcony. It's just another place. When everything she brought with her is stacked neatly and ready to go, she chooses a decanter at random and pours herself two fingers of whatever. She takes a cigarette out of the silver case and taps it on the counter-top and forces herself to think about how light it feels, how heady the drink smells, how warm the breeze is. She doesn't know where his lighter is, but there's a box of matches on the bar, and she thinks carefully and entirely about carrying her glass and her cigarette and the box of matches while she crosses the room and walks outside and stands where he'd stood. And when she gets there it does really feel like just another place, and she figures she should stop expecting something profound. 

It should be comforting, the normalcy. This is just some place, where she last saw some guy, who left behind his cigarettes and his expensive scotch, this one way too peaty for her tastes. It turns out there had been some cold comfort in the shit Kinley had whispered in her ear. Because if Lucifer had been something else, some creature, a tapeworm in the belly of the world, then the things he felt weren't real things, weren't human things. But Lucifer is just some guy, and oh, he'd hate her saying that. Maybe if she says it out loud he'll hate it enough to show up and tell her to take it back. Eyes round, hand to his heart, she can see it so clearly. Just some guy. Playful, spiteful, and frighteningly sensitive. Trapped in an ugly place, far from home. 

"What about whoever's down there?" It was the first thing she'd asked Maze, after telling her he'd gone. "Who can help him, who are his friends?" Maze had just blinked, then frowned. Then shook her head. 

It's been a long time since she's had a cigarette, and this one starts to turn her stomach halfway through. Chloe lets it burn down. Are there cigarettes where he is? Is there scotch? She thinks, for a second, that she should text Amenadiel and tell him she's cracked it—Lucifer has to be turning right around and coming back because he'd only left with one outfit. He might take it too seriously, though, and get worried about her again. 

Everyone seems to think that she's on the brink of having a breakdown or doing something rash. She wishes she could be that slightly unhinged, rash woman too, but without Lucifer around to egg her on or spin out a scheme, what's she's left with is work. Gathering the facts, working the problem. Index cards, spreadsheets, furious marginalia in much-abused copies of Paradise Lost. A whiteboard in her bedroom with a list of known unknowns. His home and all the things in it, open and empty like a crime scene. Maze and Amenadiel and Eve and even Linda, and all the impossible things they've ever said to her. All the pieces that, if she can arrange them into just the right shape, will show her the picture she needs to see to make this make sense. She just has to take her time. She just has to do the work. 

Somewhere, far away, forever is happening. Chloe tries to hold that in her head, everything all at once. The smell of the cigarettes she had outside the set of the first movie that was hers, and not her mom's. The smell of the cigarettes she snuck on her back porch while she studied for the detective exams in the middle of the night, Dan asleep upstairs, and she was glad he couldn't see how anxious it made her. The smell of the cigarettes her mom chain smoked while Chloe ran lines with her in the front seat of their ancient Buick. The smell of cigarettes that lingered on Lucifer's collar when she let herself press her face into the side of his neck just once, or just twice, less than half a dozen times, probably. The smell of the cigarette in her hand now, on the balcony up above everything that's down below. If that's what it's like where he is, every moment all the time, then he already knows she's coming for him. If that's what it's like, then she's already brought him home.

**Author's Note:**

> fyi, smoking is bad for you! you are not a fictional person and probably shouldn't do it!


End file.
